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Sunday, July 02, 2006

Lazy 4th of July weekend

I have been reading/listening to some terrific books but need to do them justice when I write about them and this is not the weekend for it apparently.I have been working on my entling's quilt. I can recommend listening to a book while sitting at the sewing machine.

This is an interesting article about the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio say they based the character of Jack Sparrow on the folktale tradition of the trickster.

Elliott and Rossio came up with the entire Pirates mythology after writing their 1992 hit "Aladdin" and long before co-creating the 2002 animation feature "Shrek." They based their concept for Jack Sparrow on the ancient "trickster" archetype.

"There's a certain moral ambiguity to the pirate genre which seemed perfect for the kind of trickster character you see in folklore all around the world," Elliott says. "You've got the Jack tales (Appalachian folk stories), the Navajo Indians' coyote legends, the spider god from African mythology."

"Shakespeare's Puck is another one," Rossio adds. "Groucho Marx and Bugs Bunny -- those are the two great American tricksters."

"We wrote Jack as a trickster," Elliott continues, "and whether Johnny got that consciously or not, you couldn't ask for better. Having written the character, it's not a performance I could have imagined, but man, it was perfect. In animation, it's called plus-ing: If something ends up on your desk, it leaves in a better state. That's what you're looking for in a movie, where everyone builds on top of each other's work to create the final work."